attacked, I say. Someone's taking photos of me. Someone else is piercing my ribs with an outsized fishing hook, trying tohoist me like a circus geek. Elsewhere, people are looking away, are drinking Champagne or Chardonnay or whatever gah. They're not looking. They're not being. Donwanna. Watch them sniff when they come around here. Where they live, no two bedrooms share the same sheets, beds go unslept-in, nothing under 500 K, nothing shared, nothing touches anything else. Peas here. Swordfish there. Delicacies. Real estate. My ribs hurt from being targeted. Their talk trails off. Wine glasses appear in their lives like thereverse of bruises, like gemstones, like something they've been awarded. I dial again. No one answers. Donwanna. Maybe they're off-roading in their safe, new vehicles, maybe they're strolling under the green linden leaves contemplating investments. I am a man called horse to them, strung up and out. I ask them if they hear the curses, if they remember the kid from High School who died while tilting a vending machine, who died defending himself with a brick. What do they tell their hairdressers? Nothingand everything. (Look! It's not like it meantanything, they say. Main Street was gorgeous,they say. The sunset stirred my cocktail, itsmelled like cedar trees, I was helplessto resist it, they say.) What do they know? What do they know of helpless? Of bruises blueblack over the bones from being knockeddown Grouse Mountain? How helpless they are to admire the new necklace of diamonds, to master the ski runs lit up at dusk. Look at me, I say, look at where this fishhookcatches my ribcage. (No one is looking.)Look at where my side becomes gills, blood-red, deep as fake rubies, as snake-berry stains on white jeans, red mouth gawping for air, gawping for help by the dumpsters behind Wholefoods. (No one comes.) Broken gin bottles, hear me! Send word to Doctor Vardaman: I am a swordfish at last; I am hooked. Lying on my side, I am drowning in air, one fisheye trained on the skyline, the diamond-like rings of sunlight glinting off the new towers, striking like tiny crystals ripping the tissue inside me.Is it curtains? Do I want Korean food? In the realm of lowest common denominators, dying ranks very high; Kim-chi less so. Well well well, look who isn't practicing his violin tonight. Look who's getting his picture taken, whose phone is evidence. It's nothing new. A woman holding a whitewine glass turns her head and sees a raveneating swordfish straight from the recycle bin.I leap from the water. She alights on the branch.